PHILADELPHIA – The CBA doesn’t expire until after 2010-11 – anyone who believes the PA will exercise its right to opt out of the agreement following the 2008-09 season hasn’t been paying the slightest attention whatsoever; what are the players going to do, hand the commissioner the keys to the lock(out) two years early? – but you can already make book on a pair of changes the NHL will insist upon in the next round of, heh-heh, negotiations.

First, expect the league to demand that all one-way contracts – and all two-way contracts where the minor league money exceeds, say, $100,000 per – be counted under the team cap.

This was part of essentially every NHL proposal through the last lockout, dropped only when the PA gave up the fight.

The league, already hearing complaints from small-market GMs about the ability of larger-revenue franchises to absorb mistakes by sending high-priced players to the minors and thus eliminating them from their season cap charge – e.g., New Jersey’s Dan McGillis ($2.2M); potentially the Rangers’ Sandis Ozolinsh ($2.75M) – is sure to insist that the waiver-relief route be closed off entirely.

So much, therefore, for the Islanders’ safety-net on the Rick DiPietro lifetime contract thing for the final 10 years of the 15-year deal.

Second, as alluded to in Buffalo early in the week by Gary Bettman, the league will attempt to eliminate salary arbitration from the next CBA. This will not be a bad thing, though not for the reasons cited by the commissioner, who in part said, “If the awards are excessive in a hard-cap system, you’ve got to take a good hard look as to whether or not the monies are being fairly allocated in a sensible way.” Not content to be the commissioner of the NHL, Bettman apparently wants to be GM for all 30 teams, as well.

Neither he nor anyone on Sixth Avenue has any business evaluating whether the right players are making the right money. What’s he trying to do, put the columnists whose job it is to second-guess and make those calls, out of business?

Bettman, however, is correct on the larger point. Salary arbitration is incompatible with a hard-cap system. It makes it harder for GMs to keep successful teams intact. It makes it impossible for teams to construct and maintain independent salary structures. For every dollar a player earns in salary arbitration, there’s a dollar less available for his team to spend. Had Brian Gionta, for instance, gone to arbitration, Lou Lamoriello would have had no chance to keep his core together for another run.

Actually, as long as salary arbitration exists within this CBA, we’d recommend an adjustment in the procedure. As it now stands, those players whose hearings are held earlier in the summer are less likely to have their awards rejected than those whose cases are held later. And those teams who have multiple cases adjudicated later in the offseason are forced into making decisions on different schedules than teams with hearings earlier the process.

Slap Shots recommends that all salary-arbitration awards be announced on the same day, thus giving every team an equal opportunity to assess its cap situation and make decisions based on a universal calendar. All other dates and deadlines in the cap process are universal. There’s no reason salary arbitration should be the lone exception.

Beyond that, we’d recommend that salary arbitration be eliminated from the next CBA – this one, as quickly as possible if the two parties agreed to amend the current agreement – with free agency accelerated by a year or two as the trade-off. Without arbitration eating up dollars and cap space, free agents would have more teams with space from which to choose and teams would have more space with which to make independent, hockey-driven decisions on personnel.

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Final and official accounting for 2005-06 revenue has been established at $2.178B. This means that an increase of just over one percent will bump the players’ share to 55-percent of the gross next season. A five-percent increase, therefore, would raise next year’s cap to approximately $48M.